Quality Ablation with CAS-One IR in sunny SoCal was a great way to kick off the year! The Society of Interventional Oncology is still a young organization (<10 years) but their annual meeting in Long Beach was a hit. It is a challenge to orchestrate a fun, yet very scientific meeting, and on top, please both physician attendees as well as industry, but all of these boxes were checked by the organizers.
In short, CAS-One IR was featured in the scientific agenda, the team had continuous scientific discussions for 12+ hours a day, and again we challenged physicians to compete against our AI with the "CAS-One IR Challenge".
SIO had an action-packed agenda with regards to Ablation - but we want to focus on the 2+ hour session titled Image Guidance and Robotics. The Moderators, Dr. Bruno Odisio (MD Anderson, Houston, USA) and Marie Beermann (Stockholm, Sweden) are both CAS-One IR users, and both also presented during the session, which was attended by close to 200 people.
Dr. Iwan Paolucci (also from MD Anderson) started off by outlining the basics of stereotactic ablation such components such as cameras and tracking (both passive and active, and electromagnetic vs optical), image registration, aiming and navigation (robotic vs manual), and more.
Dr. Beermann followed with her experience (which sits at an incredible 1400 patients treated!) where she shared her published results such as reducing recurrence by 60%+ across all tumor types, no matter complexity, and reduced costs by 35%. All of these results were achieved with CAS-One IR.
She ended with two interesting cases that highlighted the effectiveness of the newest AI-Driven software in CAS-One IR. One with a deep trajectory where the segmentation of the vessels in 3D made the procedure safer, and the other where AblaSure helped find an underablated region, where she took another 10 minutes to reablate - likely reducing the chance of local tumor progression.
Dr. Odisio closed with " putting it all together" where he drove the point home to get the whole team (radiographers, anesthesia) aligned, and trained to understand the concept of stereotaxy, so that things like patient positioning, movement, and general anesthesia are fully understood, appreciated, and executed.
The CAS-One IR challenge was held, and although there were fewer participants, Dr. Arthur Joseph from UT San Antonio took away the high score, and one of the all-time highs with his extremely accurate guess on the ablation coverage compared to what the AI based algorithm of AblaSure indicated.
Of course, dozens of scientific conversations and in-depth demonstrations were given at our booth - which has had a bold redesign.
Thanks very much to Colleen O'Brien, Shauna Munter, Angie Stitcher, Ted Farwell, and Stefan Weber for making the time in SoCal a success!